You are browsing the archive for 2013 September.

Fans of Private Eye cartoons were in for a treat this week, as editor Ian Hislop and cartoonist Nick Newman took to the stage for two separate events looking back over 50 years of visual humour in the magazine – where they picked out a few favourite gags and discussed the challenge of selecting the cartoons that make it into the magazine.

Monday night saw the pair speak to a packed auditorium at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. On Thursday, they were joined for their appearance at the Soho Literary Festival by Richard Ingrams, Hislop’s predecessor at the Eye and now editor of The Oldie.

The talks were scheduled to coincide with the launch of Private Eye: A Cartoon History, a handsome new hardback book edited by Newman and containing more than 1000 of the best cartoons published by the magazine over the last five decades. Ingrams was promoting his latest collection of Oldie cartoons, also published this month.

Hislop and Newman began their National Theatre talk by looking back at some of the Eye cartoons that have gone on to become classics, including drawings by Willie Rushton, Martin Honeysett, Michael Heath, John Kent and Ed McLachlan (above). They observed that cartoons became increasingly surreal and absurd during the 1970s – with the giant hedgehog being a case in point – and Newman noted that many of the best political cartoons have not made it into his book because their impact has been lost over time.

Libby Purves, the journalist, broadcaster and Procartoonists.org patron, was on hand to steer the conversation. She pointed out that there still seems to be life in cartoonist cliches such as the desert island and the suicidal man-on-ledge. Hislop agreed, observing that “Private Eye is nothing if not repeated jokes with slight twists.” He referred to two recent psychiatrist’s couch gags, both by Procartoonists.org member Royston Robertson, which played with the formula and made it into the magazine.

More generally, Hislop praised gag cartoonists for their ability to distil their observations of the world around them into pithy and memorable scenes. “They’ve observed it, frozen it, and made it more or less permanent,” he said.

The issue of ‘bad taste’ was raised when a cartoon by PCOer Alexander Matthews (above) was met by explosive laughter – and some gasps. Purves asked where Hislop draws the line when it comes to offending his readership.

“I always have to be able to justify it – to myself, if to no one else,” said Hislop. “And sometimes there are things that might offend people, but that you think just have to be said. We got a lot of complaints about this cartoon, but I just thought it was incredibly funny.”

Newman explained to the crowd that a cartoonist’s life can be defined by whether he or she is able to cope with having most of their work rejected on a regular basis. He also agreed with Purves’ observation that there are fewer high-profile markets for cartoons these days, following the demise of Punch and with newspapers not currently running standalone gags.

Hislop said that “without Matt, The Telegraph would be in real trouble”, and argued that readers would welcome non-topical joke cartoons in the newspapers. “Editors are missing a trick; cartoons are not expensive,” he said, turning to Newman with a threatening grin before adding: “and they’re getting cheaper next week!”. We hope he was joking.

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“I’ve got a much smaller book, but it’s also a lot cheaper,” said a deadpan Ingrams of his Oldie paperback collection, when he joined the others on stage at the Soho Theatre on Thursday. “Nick’s book is terribly good, but you can’t take it into the toilet – my book you can.”

The presence of Ingrams at this second talk meant more anecdotes about the 1960s satire boom – for example that it was Willie Rushton who persuaded Gerald Scarfe to stop drawing desert island gags and have a go at caricature.

But Ingrams was also keen to talk about the current crop of cartoonists, and his slideshow of gags from the Oldie book included one or two from younger talents, among them the cartoon below by Procartoonists.org member Huw Aaron.

Hislop explained that the sheer number of cartoons flooding in to the Eye means he is required to make quick decisions over what to publish.

“When I choose cartoons, I think ‘is that funny?’, rather than ‘is it beautifully drawn?’,” said Hislop. Ingrams agreed, but added that the drawing itself should be amusing, not simply the idea behind it.

“Cartoonists don’t realise that they’re probably the most important part of a magazine,” said Ingrams, citing a recent readership survey in which roughly 80% said that cartoons were their favourite part of The Oldie.

Both talks were packed and the audiences were extremely appreciative, filling the room with laughter at pretty much every cartoon shown – and with several jokes even eliciting a round of applause.

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Also this week, Private Eye launched Newman’s book with a party at Kettner’s in Soho attended by Eye staff and dozens of the magazine’s cartoonists. A great night was had by all and it was an excellent opportunity for the cartoonists to mingle and swap stories.

Of course, Michael Gove could be a keen and knowledgeable student of the arts – first in line when there’s something new at Tate Modern, burning his thumbs on disposable cigarette lighters at Glastonbury, and clamouring for Bob Fosse retrospective tickets at the Albert Hall. Could be. He could be utterly distraught at the arts’ demotion.

Maybe he removed the arts from the core curriculum because he simply had to make cuts. Something had to give. And he couldn’t possibly cut maths or English or the Blessed Sciences could he? Couldn’t he? Why not? Well because there’d be a national outcry wouldn’t there?

And he couldn’t dare cut P.E., not after the glorious Olympic Games and their glittering, noble legacy. And we simply must have more physicists. We’re way behind Norway here, and standards in English literature in the UK are bettered by kids in Japan.

How about standards in arts education in the last 20 years? Anybody bothered looking at those in comparison with other countries? The UK would probably do well enough. But doing well in arts education overall, certainly in the secondary sphere, has never counted for much in the UK, mainly because those who judge it had a meagre arts education themselves.

So in demoting arts education to the fringes of the National Curriculum, Mr Gove is on safe ground. The majority of the enfranchised population will not rise up in horror. They are drip-fed the notion, mainly through the popular media, that dance is only for the naturally violently talented Billy Elliots of this world and that their dogs could do what Tracey Emin did to become a millionaire.

And yet, while we all know that nobody can expect to live a fulfilled and rounded life without having studied compulsory geography, the arts will out. Arts workshops, nearly always run on a shoestring, abound. Successful arts professionals give their time for not much money, and often for nothing at arts festivals, like – dare I say it ? – the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival.

Their workshops are always full, not with the naturally capable but with all ages who want to know how. Is that how geography workshops operate? At geography festivals? Is there a “Big Geog” jostling for a place in the nation’s affections with the evangelic barnstorm that is the Big Draw? Of course not.

Who’d go to a geography workshop? Don’t need to. That’s all looked after in school after cheerleading on Tuesday afternoons. The Big Draw probably doesn’t ask for tick-box answers about Jasper Johns, but it IS hands on.

Making communicative marks is probably the one thing the human animal can do which other animals can’t. Yes, some humans can draw well naturally. But by the same token, other humans like Sebastian Vettel can drive cars naturally well. Their prowess doesn’t put the majority of us off learning to drive. But we do that for socio-economic reasons. We don’t learn to draw for the same reasons.

So why do we/should we do it? Why should Mr Gove do it? Its because its EDUCATIONAL, that’s why. To “educate” means to “bring out”, and I’d bet a pound to a penny that an arts workshop or a practical, hands-on Big Draw session will bring out more hitherto unseen natural ability than would a geography festival.

I suppose I’d better apologise now for having a pop at geography. Its probably down to Mrs Leeming fifty-odd years ago. She was very keen on my class knowing all the facts and figures surrounding worldwide ground-nut production in countries that are no longer part of the British Empah and have names of their own now. It was hugely boring.

Mrs Lemming (her nickname) was a bit limited. There’s nothing limited about the arts education potential in this country. Sadly, should the essentially inexperienced, non-drawing, non-painting, non-sculpting Mr Gove get his way, that will all get booted into the long grass (quite close to where they’re practicing core curriculum cheerleading).

Conception of the Remote Austerity of Garbo (detail) by R.S. Sherriffs @ Procartoonists.org

Here at the Procartoonists blog we’re hearing very good things about The Age of Glamour: Stars of Stage and Screen, an exhibition of drawings by the Scottish cartoonist R.S. Sherriffs.

It focuses on the golden age of Hollywood and the West End stage and includes caricatures of Greta Garbo, above, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Ivor Novello, Buster Keaton, Laurence Olivier and many others.

Included in the show are single portraits as well as ensemble pieces. The drawings first featured in magazines such as Radio Times and The Sketch.

The Sherriffs exhibition runs until 24 December, alongside a redisplay of the Cartoon Museum collection, including many recent acquisitions. Visit the Cartoon Museum website.

Remember your school reports? They become ingrained. Like your first snog. Mine weren’t bad. English, history, art, even P.E. (he was a bully) were all good but then they fell into the maths abyss. That bit was never good. I really didn’t care how long it took six men with rubber teaspoons to fill six wheelbarrows etc.

Last week I saw my 11-year-old grand-daughter’s report . She’s in Year 7 (that’s first year in old money and is a term thought up by some non-teaching think-tanker to give the impression that the learning process is seamless. It most definitely is not.) It was a good report apart from maths where the rubber teaspoon brigade didn’t quite click.

But there were a couple of subjects Grandad didn’t quite understand, i.e. why they were being taught and how they being taught. One was, you won’t believe this, cheerleading. That’s right, cheerleading. I mean, dear God, this is an all-girl comp. What on Earth is the school encouraging here ? Cheerleading is where a group of comely young women wiggle about celebrating male sporting prowess, isn’t it?

And the other was – gimme an A, gimme an R, gimme a T – Art, art art! (See? We got there eventually). Emily – for it is she – got a good comment in art. So I asked her what they did in art. “Well,” she said. “We’ve just done Jasper Johns.”

Now, I think that art, unlike cheerleading, is useful and teachable, and I’m all for the Big Draw events. But Emily and her 11-year-old chums don’t get all hands-on with clay, ink and paint. No. They DO Jasper Johns. She did say that “sometimes” they were allowed to draw. But mostly they DID artists. Don’t misunderstand me, nothing wrong with history of art. But exclusively? With 11-year-olds?

So who’s the villain here? I will tell you. It is Michael Gove, that’s who. I know that cheerleading sneaked in under the common-sense radar because apparently it’s accepted as being an alternative to P.E. Do they do history of cheerleading too?

Mr Gove doesn’t care about the arts subjects – quite possibly because his own art education was a bit thin. He sees dance, drama, music and art as hobbies. Pastimes. They no longer merit a place in the core curriculum (from September 2014) but because it bumps and grinds in under the P.E. banner, cheerleading does.

A pound to a penny Mr Gove believes that being able to draw is a “gift” and cannot be taught. He probably believes he can’t draw. I could teach him.

Ed adds: We hope Mr Gove takes up Bill’s kind offer. We think a lesson would make some fine Reithian-style television for the British Broadcasting Corporation or similar. Don’t miss part two of Bill’s thoughts on art in education which is due next week.

The booklet features an introduction by the writer A.L. Kennedy and includes thoughts on human rights from the cartoonists themselves. Michael Heath accompanies his cartoon with a succint thought: “It’s nice to be able to draw anything you want without being arrested.”

I’ve been drawing a regular cartoon for the website of Radio 2’s Alex Lester for four years now, a connection that meant I got asked along to the BBC station’s Hyde Park gig on Sunday.

The brief was to draw live caricatures of all the artists appearing – around 30 people – as well as the radio presenters who were taking part, in one large image.

As I’m not a natural “on-the-spot” caricaturist, I took the precaution of preparing roughs before the event, then inking them up on the day, but leaving out the hairstyles just in case something radical had happened to them (i.e. Jessie J).

They provided me with a space in the production area, which turned out to be a pair of teepees and far more palatial than the damp Portakabin I’d been expecting. As well as housing the console that Terry Wogan, Jo Whiley and Ken Bruce etc sat behind to do their shows, there was a comfy sofa for celeb interviews, a bar, table football, smoke machine, mirrorball – not a dump in the slightest.

Assorted famous faces drifted in and out during the day, occasionally commenting on their likenesses or perceived lack thereof.

At some points it was all a bit overwhelming: Johnny Walker sitting on my stool so I could get his hair right; the singers Jack Johnson and Josh Groban and Radio 2’s legendary Sally Traffic stopping for a chat; and Elaine Paige saying I’d made her boss-eyed (I had).

Whispering Bob Harris turned up unexpectedly and had to be pencilled in in the corner – while the Manic Street Preachers played an acoustic set behind me. It was enough to keep me in name-dropping anecdotes for years to come.

Another one for the diary: Tony Rushton, former art director at Private Eye, will be taking part in a panel discussion about satirical images through the ages at the Royal Academy on 22 November. Click here to book.

“It’ll all be over by Christmas,” I joked, as we all shook hands with the general staff at BBC Two and agreed to produce a scripted, filmed and edited version of our World War One comedy-drama The Wipers Times before the end of 2012.

It’s now September 2013 – Christmas has come and gone – and we are in the midst of publicising our recreation of the trenches filmed over two months at the stately home Ballywalter Park, near Belfast. Bombs exploded, ricochets whined, and actors began to comprehend what life in the trenches was really like. “We get the picture,” said Julian Rhind-Tutt (of Green Wing and The Hour fame). “We’ve been in the trenches for seven days and we understand … the horrors.”

The Wipers Times story has been almost 100 years in the making. My co-writer Ian Hislop came across it some ten years ago while working on a documentary for Radio 4. It’s the story of a humorous newspaper produced amidst the chaos of the trenches by a group of soldiers who had found a printing press in the ruins of Ypres (translated by military slang into Wipers).

Amazingly, their Captain, Fred Roberts, decided to produce not a journal of record, but a journal of jokes, with no experience at all. It was, by turns, subversive, mawkish, groaningly punny – and incredibly funny. It was this printed lampoon of the Great War, written under fire, that we have attempted to celebrate on the screen.

As a cartoonist, I’ve always enjoyed turning gags into sketches for TV – which I’ve done for numerous shows from Spitting Image to Harry Enfield and beyond. A good cartoon is, I think, a perfectly formed sketch (forgive the pun). Extend the sketch and you have a scene. Extend the scene and you have an act. Add a splash of character and you have a play.

So writing Wipers was, for me, a process of linking gags, sketches, and scenes into a comprehensible – and true – screenplay. We were helped by the original text, which is wonderful, the authentic voice of troops on the Front Line. Wherever possible we tried to use the authors’ own words rather than our own – so full credit should go to Captain Fred Roberts and Lt Jack Pearson, his sub-editor. Some of their jokes (and many of ours) are terrible. But that’s not the point. The point is that they were making jokes at all, as opposed to staring wistfully into space and writing poetry, as most World War One dramas would have you believe (though to be fair, there is quite a lot of poetry in Wipers).

Bruce Bairnsfather from Fragments from France @ Procartoonists.org

Research took us to Flanders, still a fractured landscape where farmers are regularly blown up by unexploded bombs, and France where the Somme glides through Amiens with a tranquility it’s hard to equate with events of a century ago.

On the way we picked up some exciting new primary source material – memoirs of Roberts and Pearson ( both of which we’ve included in our film). And we’ve encountered some strange coincidences: J.H. Pearson, played by Julian Rhind-Tutt, was in fact the brother of the Edwardian actor Edward Hesketh Pearson, who had an affair with Kitty Muggeridge, wife of Malcolm Muggeridge who was played by Julian Rhind-Tutt in a BBC film about P.G. Wodehouse … and filmed in exactly the same locations as Wipers.

So here we are in September, with shooting (real and imaginary) over. In the editing suite the whizz-bangs and gas-gongs have whizzed, banged and chimed. I have seen the great Michael Palin deliver my lines – so shall die happy – been bought a drink by Emilia Fox (likewise), swapped cricket nerdery with our star Ben Chaplin and marvelled at the skill and enthusiasm of our Belfast crew.

And it really WILL all be over by Christmas. But, as happened in the Great War, not the Christmas we were expecting.

Digitally created artwork submitted by post is a fair compromise. We know that when cartoonists submit artwork by email there is always one who shuns the standard 300dpi Jpeg format and goes for a Tiff file the size of a house!

There are two categories in the Young Cartoonists contest: under 18 and under 30. One cartoon, up to A4 in size, can be submitted and it can be colour or black and white. Send to: Young Cartoonists of the Year Competition, Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London WC1A 2HH. The closing date for entries is 30 September. Artwork cannot be returned.

Judges include cartoonists from newspaper including The Times, The Guardian and Private Eye. The judges’ decision is final. Winners will be given their prizes at the Cartoon Art Trust Awards on 17 October.

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